Authoring Autism: On Rhetoric and Neurological Queerness (Thought in the Act)

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Using storying as her method, she presents an alternative view of autistic rhetoricity by foregrounding the cunning rhetorical abilities of autistics and by framing autism as a narrative condition wherein autistics are the best-equipped people to define their experience. A closely argued, elegantly performed, and even joyfully humorous work of critical emancipatory scholarship.

it is impossible to deny that the arguments structuring public knowledges, understandings, and felt senses of autism are grossly ableist, powerfully violent, and unremarkably nonautistic. Remi Yergeau employs their rhetorical scalpel to dismantle the clinical assumptions and cultural stereotypes that have been used to deny, dismiss, and obscure the basic humanity of autistic people for generations. Because I am hopelessly lost on rhetoric (and, disappointingly, queer studies), I'll admit that the introduction and first chapters took me multiple days and many hours of reading to understand, but damn - it was worth it. But I do not subscribe to functioning labels because functioning labels are inaccurate and dehumanizing, because functioning labels fail to capture the breadth and complexity and highly contextual interrelations of one's neurology and environment, both of which are plastic and malleable and dynamic.Fortunately, Yergeau infuses the text with a lot of personality and humor, and it’s a subject I have many strong feelings about: the idea that autism/neurodivergence is a narrative identity, and the best people to define and describe that identity are the people living it.

I would consider myself educated; I'm in the first year of my masters degree at the time of writing this.

Queerness and disability may not be equivalent or even analogical, but they are resonant and interweaving constructs, and they are norm-shattering ways of moving," (p. Contrary to another review here, I don’t believe Yergeau is attempting to assimilate autism to queerness. It is not the prosocial rhetoric of making toy cars go vroom, but is rather an engagement with the materiality of the toy car abd tge rubbery feeling of wheels against skin.

Using storying as their method, they present an alternative view of autistic rhetoricity by foregrounding the cunning rhetorical abilities of autistics and by framing autism as a narrative condition wherein autistics are the best-equipped people to define their experience. I am particularly drawn to thinking from the position of the nonhuman, of the 'us' that contains no 'i', no subjects or persons but only an open field of being in which I am just as other from my own hand as I am from my cat.In Yergeau's world we trade intersectionality for fractionalism, agency for inertia, and meaningful analysis for hollow, smirking equivocation. Beneath the humor, however, bubbles a righteous and justified rage that such a book even has to be written, that Yergeau essentially has to spend all this time pointing out that autism is not, in fact, a lack (as everything from the clinical literature to organizations that at least ostensibly 'speak' for autism seem to portray it as); that she has to defend herself and autistic people as human.